how to fight zombies after the Brady Bill

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2003)

(while I admire the effort and usually love this sort of movie, I have to rate this one as a total failure)
Until the arrival of some military squaddies at the end, there's little to no mention of firearms in this film. If zombies had taken over, I think finding a gun would be on the top of my to-do list. At the very least, if I'd woken up one morning to find a city abandoned, I'd still get a gun at the very least for hunting purposes (horse meat, anyone?).

The most troubling aspect of this movie is its total lack of originality. The basic premise is stolen from THE CRAZIES and DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, with a virus wiping everything out and making people go mad. Then it shoots into DAWN OF THE DEAD territory with characters raiding a store in a very inferior fashion (again neglecting real weapons), and then DAY OF THE DEAD when we run into some hapless underdeveloped military goons not unlike the convicts in ALIEN 3. There's also a 12 MONKEYS/STREETFIGHTER/CLOCKWORK ORANGE reference at the beginning, involving apes being conditioned by watching violent images, then getting let loose by animal rights activists.
The plot and premise is full of holes: why do rage victims not attack each other? How do they violate the laws of physics to get so much blood and energy? How would a virus that takes effect so quickly spread across a body of water? (I could just imagine an airline pilot still piloting his route, totally oblivious to the fact that all his passengers are hyperactive blood-barfing zombies - or someone calmly boarding a plane right in the 15-20 seconds after getting bitten.)
Most memorably bad is the awful look to the cinematography. I've shot with a Canon XL-1 with little to no understanding of how to properly white-balance it or do good lighting, and the picture I got didn't look nearly this bad, with pixelly video artifacts, jagged lines, etc. The cheapness really showed through during the brighter scenes. With a $15 million dollar budget, the filmmakers may as well have used 16mm or 35mm, because even though they blocked traffic and shot DV on the fly, there's still a few shots where you can clearly see cars in the distance.
All in all, this movie sounds a lot better than it is. None of the violence is clearly visible due to a rapid ADD-like style of cutting during the action scenes.